US hawkish Senator John McCain has said that Secretary of State John Kerry should step down over a series of foreign policy “failures.”

Appearing on Fox News on Friday, McCain was directly asked if Kerry should resign over the mounting turmoil in Iraq. The Arizona Republican responded that he “had not thought much about John Kerry” before finally saying “yes.”

McCain added that Kerry should consider stepping down not only because of the crisis in Iraq but also because of “the failure of Geneva [talks on Syria], the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian issue [and] the probable failure of negotiations with Iran.”

The senator called on Thursday for all of President Obama’s national security team to resign over the growing turmoil in Iraq. He also said this week that chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, should step down.

The Obama administration has come under fire over the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, where an al-Qaeda-linked group has captured key cities and vows to march on Baghdad.

On Friday, President Barack Obama ruled out sending American troops "back into combat". However, the administration is weighing whether to launch airstrikes inside Iraq to target terrorists.

The US president admitted that the escalating violence in Iraq was a spin-off from the conflict in neighboring Syria where the US and its Arab allies have been financing and arming an insurgency against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

On Friday, Kerry said that the US is “laser focused” on Iraq but the decision on whether the US military would get reengaged in the Middle Eastern country would come soon.

"Iraq is a country we've had a very direct relationship with, very direct investment and engagement with, not to mention the lives of our soldiers who were lost there, providing this opportunity to them," Kerry told reporters in London.

"And I don't think anybody in the region, or in this administration, believes it is in the interest of the United States to turn our backs on that."
Nearly 4,500 US troops were killed in the Iraq war that began with an invasion in 2003.

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